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speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s been two days and I still … well … I’d be lying if I say I can’t actually believe it, I don’t have the greatest opinion of the American populous with regards to sanity and intellect (sorry, but well, George Bush Jr was president for eight years and people actually voted for him; and let’s not get started on Nathan Deal‘s reelection to Georgia’s governorship in 2014) … but idiomatically speaking I can’t actually believe that Donald J Trump is president-elect of The United State of America.

I’ve never been so glad I live in New England; Massachusetts specifically. I can’t imagine the terror that so many others in this country must feel right now. Or more to the point I can’t imagine how they’re managing given the horror I feel and I’m relatively safe.

I can’t express how terrifying it is to know that a Republican lead congress is going to have that as their president and Mike Pence of Indiana for the vice presidency. We just took a giant step back to the 1950s. 60+ years of progress are, largely, out the window. If you’re not a heteronormative cisgender white male nor able to pass, you’re pretty frankly and thoroughly fucked. heteronormative cisgender white women are slightly less bad off, especially if they’re both pretty and a decent housewife, but everyone else in this country are utterly fucked.

You say it can’t be that bad, he still has to contend with the constitution and blah, blah, blah.

he gets to fill the missing slot on the supreme court

who’s getting to make the laws next year, and who’s holding the pen to sign them?

who’s going to be pulling the Department of Justice’s strings when hateful mobs are emboldened by his rhetoric and stances?

Yesterday I felt a level of depression I haven’t in ages. It left me, for a large part of the day, feeling physically ill – like sick to my stomach. Today I’m either in a better place, thankfully and slightly mysteriously, or I’m too emotionally exhausted and slipped into a sort of … neutrality … to recharge; I’m not actually sure which.

This planet is in too precarious a position with regards to the climate and pollution to survive four years with this setup selecting who’s running the EPA and deciding things like energy bills.

The economy isn’t ready for this.

We’re not touching what America calls a health care system – unfortunately congress and Trump are going to molest the hell out of it.

NOW I regret deleting my Twitter … though it hasn’t actually disappeared, I may log in. I’ve a few choice quips to throw out there.

I mean, don’t come in with any more “protecting the women and children” crap when trying to ban transgender people from using the correct bathroom when we have a president-elect with how many rape accusations, who boasted about committing sexual assault, and who is going to trial soon for child rape.

No. If I can I think I will leave the country. I don’t think I’d be able to though; doubt I could talk any country into seeing a transgender lesbian in Trump’s USA as a refugee seeking asylum, at least not until after he’s rounding up people to wear little pink triangles …

If you follow me and you voted for him … why? how? What could he possibly have offered that was worth sacrificing the safety and rights of your neighbours, friends, and family? Of the safety and rights, even simple human dignity of countless millions of this country’s people? If you can answer that, with a straight face, and sincerely … please do. Otherwise, please fucking piss off and go to Hell.

Yeah, normally I’m rather more inclined to be well spoken, polite, maybe a bit more … sweet? I can’t. I’m terrified, I’m depressed, I’m disgusted, I’m mortified, I’m not going to go find a thesaurus to continue this paragraph and I can’t think clearly enough to keep it going right now.

The world, and this country both need a lot of prayers … and a lot of outright protest, petitioning possibly open rebellion; you know, action, because the gods help us (please!) but I’m disinclined to reckon they’re going to do much good since they didn’t do anything to stop this in the first place.

I’ve just been watching the latest crap floating round this country, the UK, Northern Ireland, and other places and I’ve got to say something.

SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY!

That feels better.

For the more articulate point.

These people are supposedly all about protecting families, especially children. Yet they are bound and determined to kill … untold hundreds, thousands, millions? of them. And I wish it were hyperbole, but it’s not. Literal death by violent attack, by suicide, or figurative death of spirit.

LGBTQIA… I think the Tumblr crowd has it up to 47 letters borrowing from Icelandic and Cyrillic these days, but these kids need to know what’s up.

Pre-school, kindergarden … as early as possible. I Am Jazzneeds to be part of elementary curriculums and in every library across the world. There needs to be sexuality ones too, frankly.

That the little boys don’t have to date/marry the little girls, and vice versa.

Kids are neither blank slates, nor do they exist and grow up in a vacuum, in a bubble, unless you force them into it (citation: look up the history of David Willis sometime … simple version: Joyce is, basically, him). They’ll have heard of homosexuality and transsexualism. And some versions are more hurtful than others.

Imagine, if you will, a child who knows there are “men” who “want to be women” who “get it cut off” … but that’s it. That’s all she knows of the medical advances of transgender treatment. Now, when she’s 8 and the fact that she has testes is starting to withdraw her into clinical degrees of shyness and self-consciousness she doesn’t know that, really, yes, she could be the girl she is and isn’t forced to be a boy. If she doesn’t know this, then she grows up, puberty has it’s horrible way, and … well this story can go one of two ways. For me, not so badly. I was blessed to look so feminine that even when I was trying so desperately to be male that I grew a big bloody Grizzly Freaking Adams beard people did double-takes when they’d see me in the men’s room but no one has ever given me a second glance in the ladies’. Or there are those for whom a mix of financial woes and biological ones … look a bit more like Martin dressed up as Shanaynay (hey, I grew up in the 80s and 90s and haven’t really watched much TV since 2002, what did you expect for a reference?).

Lesbian and gay … life’s getting better. Not great, no, but better for them. It’s no longer Hollywood Montrose everywhere you look for gay and lesbians are nowhere to be seen. Bi … somehow bi confuses some people, but all of the bi people I know seem to have a firm enough grasp on it I honestly don’t know if from their point of view it was bad and isn’t that people, in looking around for something to put down, haven’t started making it bad for them. I’ll leave this one alone because I can’t make heads nor tails out of what the hell happened with bi, or if it’s just another place where I’ve always lived in remarkably accepting circles.

Seriously, kids need to know this is okay. Because we’ve been doing the opposite for a long time and these kids suffer for it. The transkids … let’s just think of those statistics. Too many Leelah Alcorns. Kids need to know that, if they’re not feeling anything whatsoever for the opposite sex and are noticing how attractive their own sex is … this is a Thing and it’s not a Bad Thing and that maybe they shouldn’t try to force themselves into a relationship or a life of loneliness over it.

Seriously. Don’t come around talking about the sanctity of the family, and protecting children and all that other complete and total bullshit that every last one of these psychopathic, sociopathic, deranged assholes start spouting every time this matter comes up when you’re encouraging the kinds of environments that drive these kids to suicide, to madness, to self-hatred, and more. Don’t talk that kind of idiocy while applauding parents who disown their children. Don’t stick up for “morally righteous families” like the bloody Duggars.

These kids need to know about the world around them. The real world around them. They need protected, not … not whatever you call nearly a dozen US states suing President Obama and the Department of Education over their transgender guidance. Of states that ban discussion of LGB+ matters even in secondary school. Well, honestly, most of those states support “abstinence only sex ed” which has its own laundry list of stupidity.

In case it isn’t abundantly clear by this point, this is something I’m a bit passionate about. It’s a place where I’m looking around at my country, and at the world, being complete twats about something that shouldn’t be any sort of issue or controversy except that some loud mouthed jerks seem to get their flippin’ jollies off by finding someone they can get away with making the lives of miserable; by oppression if preference is offered.

Would I feel this way if I were neither lesbian nor trans? YES, I’m pretty well positive I would given that I felt this way even when I didn’t understand that I was … I mean when you spend the better part of three decades convinced you’re a straight man you maybe get a broader perspective on your own “what if” scenarios. I was as impassioned about it then as now, just with less … insight … given my own determined efforts to avoid seeing it on a personal level. But that too. How common was, and all too often still is, the story of someone not realising their gender or sexuality until adulthood? Until failed marriages and a life of serious depression? Thankfully less and less. The world is blessedly shifting toward a higher balance of Jazz Jennginses than Caitlyn Jenners.

Yeah, people are possibly going to want to say something harsh about “passing privilege”. All I’ll say about it is: yes it’s a matter now thanks to idiotic nonsense like HB2 in North Carolina, but by and large it’s something that just has to be considered moot. If someone with a full face of beard, wearing jeans and a flannel, can stand in the gents’ and have guys walk in and double check the door to make sure they went into the right one … it’s no use. Someone is going to mistake Barbie for a man and Thor for a woman because there’s just no telling what criterion people are going to use to decide a person’s gender visually. There are cis women with beards, and cis men with breasts. It happens. Yeah, it definitely makes life easier when people are less inclined to get it wrong, believe me, I understand and know that. But let’s stop talking about “passing privilege” and maybe focus on understanding and acceptance altogether from BOTH sides. There are, after all, some gender non-conforming people who bend gender to a breaking point and while that’s fine, let’s try to remember that you’re going to confuse people – give them a break – just as they should at least be civil enough not to start beating the shit out of you and screaming just because there’s a person in the ladies’ with facial hair doing nothing more than washing her hands.

I’m going to be late for work if I don’t force myself to stop venting and get dressed.

Sorry about that. This has just been a year of hell for me. Some ups, certainly. Moving to Massachusetts has been pretty cool if not without its sour notes. I’ve become addicted to Doctor Who which is bloody fantastic, but Netflix (henceforth referred to as ‘the meanie bad people’ for short) haven’t got series 9 yet, so I don’t get to find out what’s been going on.

I’ve been managing to write. Not as much or as often as I’d like. Some of it has been a lack of time. Since 12 November I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of days and hours dealing with my jobs, but that’s starting to mellow out. The time I have had that could be spent writing has been spent in the sorts of things one must do in order that stress does not eat her brain … and sufficient stress of the wrong sort is bad for people with chronic depression (and I are one such person), and if you’ve ever tried to write when having attacks of depression you know it tends to make the stories go in dark and unhappy directions. Dark and unhappy can be fine, here and there, but we’re talking the kind of dark and unhappy that gets you the “the dog dies” award (sorry, forgot its name, lots of kids books I never liked at all have it – to the point I treat it the same as a skull and crossbones on a bottle in the cupboard).

So far, as of the same sorts of dates that 2015 had started looking down (early December 2014, no lie), 2016 is starting to look really up. So, that said, I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for a summer 2016 release of the, still, unnamed Book 3. I’ve gotten more than a page into the first Færie Patrolwhich is turning out interesting and teaching me fun things about the world and characters. Can’t recall if I ever got any further in the story about that transgender girl I started one day on a whim (no link because I’m buggered if I recall where I mentioned that).

I’m going to try to be a little more active here soon. Some of it is going to bend my guidelines RE talking politics (read: I’m going to bloody well talk about a few things, and I may as well warn I use words I learnt from my wife when Donald Trump and the GOP get brought up these days), primarily US politics. I might not, though. I also may talk about some of the quirkier trans* issues. I shan’t be discussing the new Star Wars film because I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to see it due to being, currently, unable to afford a ticket (while I’m not saying this in hopes people will donate a ticket, this is the internet and I’ve seen it happen too many times to not point to the contact link above for anyone who takes this notion into their head. This said because I may as well – if I explicitly said “please do not …” people would anyway, so screw trying).

As per usual, Happy Holidays. I’m in a sufficiently high Jewish populated area to know that Hanukkah is over or nearly so, so happy belated that. Merry Christmas coming up for those folks. Solstice/Jül/etc is coming up later this week for my Pagan loves, so enjoy – no over indulging in the holy water for you ADF folks. Turns out there’re almost as many Muslim holidays in December as there are days in the year (just kidding, but there are a lot) and I can’t spell any but Ramadan, but as especially fond happy/merry/blessed series of celebrations for you folks; sorry for all the crap people are giving you, please know some of us do wish you well and would love to punch certain people in the mouth on your behalf.

So, when I tell people I’ve published a book I get some very odd questions, but one that comes up often is “so how did that happen?”

How does one answer that? I usually go with “I went through most of a pack of paper and several ink cartridges.”

Thing is, that is how it happens. I know a lot of writers, but I don’t know many authors. The difference? The former have ideas, and they write … a lot … but they never finish anything, or never put it out there when they’re done.

Some don’t want to publish, they write for their own pleasure. This is well and good. Just as there are plenty of people, some of them brilliantly talented, who paint or draw just for the pleasure of it and others who sell their work so the same should be with any art or craft; writing is no exception.

For the rest, just get to work.

Now, some myths:

You must write every day, no exceptions and no excuses!

Bullshit. This is so very much not true. This seems to be more prominent among Americans. For those in other countries, America is a barbarism where paid sick leave (or even unpaid!) isn’t always available and rather than rise up in revolution against it we developed “the Americanwork ethic” and it’s as perverse as it sounds.

No, art suffers if you do it when you’re not up to it. Now, you must be self aware enough to know the difference between “I’m just not feeling it today” and “I really don’t want to write this scene”. The former is fine. There is no point spending an hour staring at the paper writing nothing, or in writing for an hour a few thousand words that you’ll throw away tomorrow. The latter … get it over with and move on.

Mmmm … yes and no. There can be a number of things that are preventing you from moving forward in your story. Maybe it turns out you need to backtrack and rewrite something, but until you discover that you’re stuck and you can’t move on. Maybe your dog died and you just can’t concentrate. Maybe you’re a chronic depressive and you’re having a low day, week, month, year … and you can’t seem to write anything or write anything you want to keep.

Writer’s block is no superstitious concept. It’s a simple lack of inspiration. It can have a billion and one causes and reasons, and it can have two billion and five solutions.

Find your solutions, but don’t let anyone tell you that all you have to do is plant your arse in the chair and write (unless, you know, that actually works for you).

You should write like … / Never use …

Just … no. No, definitely not. Proof? Look at the criticisms of any wildly popular work. I mean the stuff that lasts, like Harry Potter, The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and so many many more. They break rules, some break every modern rule. Bill Shakespeare broke the rules, his contemporaries did not; who do we remember? Ms Rowling was writing in a “dead genre”, among other “writing faux pas”; who is the best selling author of all time (no Bible comments, please)?

Don’t take thou shalt and thou shalt not from any author, even the most successful ones. First off, Stephen King said to avoid adverbs, not to never use them; he uses them. Thing is, it makes a kind of sense for the pacing and tone of his books, but that’d be horrid advice for Lawrence Block to follow.

I mean “thou shalt write thine own damned book” and “thou shalt finish what thou starts” and “once it’s bloody finished, bloody publish it” and so forth, those are fine. “Thou shalt find thine own voice/style”, etc. this is good. Absolutes suck, but “absolutes” are good reminders that we’re creating art. We’re not building and designing nuclear reactors here, there is no precise science to follow; this is art, it’s all about imperfections, experimentation, creativity, and doing whatever. Well, unless you’re trying to put out a cheap dime pulp in a hurry that’s deliberately formulaic and such … but that’s a complete other kettle of popcorn.

You must do X, Y, Z before you can write your novel / [blah blah blah] pay your dues …

I don’t know where to begin with this one. It’s just not true on many levels.

The “examples” usually given weren’t people following a deliberate career path, they were coincidences (and if you’ll notice it’s generally the same list of specific, mostly, old scifi authors.) and leaves out the numerous examples of people who are just as famous or more-so who didn’t go this route.

There’s not really a short fiction market anymore. Well, self-published, but not a “professional” short market.

That “gotta write a million words” or whatever it was, wasn’t meant to be literal gospel truth and it certainly wasn’t thinking just write a million words of pure drivel. You must always be aiming for quality and somewhere in there will be mistakes and pitfalls from which we learn and grow. Read all of Sir Terry Pratchett‘s work from earliest to final (moment of sadness) and you’ll see it. Heinlein, Asimov, Dickens … you see it if you look at someone with a long enough career. Some start to lose their touch and so the opposite can become true as well.

In simple, and as always, to be blunt: go ye forth and write, finish what you write (unless it really is garbage, but get at least a second if not twenty-fifth opinion on that subject before genuinely trashing it), find a means to get it to the world. That’s the only sure-fire formula for success. Everything else is superstition.

In all sincerity it has taken this long to convince myself I’m not dreaming … I got a text from a rights group that announced the decision the moment it was given, but … wow.

I expect, once it’s sunk in, I shall have more to say in days to come but right now I’m too overwhelmed. Also I’m busy baking in a daily hell of record breaking GEORGIA summer highs. 110°F in the shade is terrible for cognitive thought and/or creativity (which potentially explains a great deal about the deep south).

Congrats to all the newlywed couples out there and all the ones whose marriages have been properly accepted and respected by the laws of our supposedly free nation.

Well, stress of life is coming to an end and I’m finding myself with inclination to write even as I return to having precious little time for it (day jobs suck).

I’ve found a new job, I look slightly more forward to grating my own face with a nutmeg mill than the job in question, but I might’ve found a more appealing one that, besides being no less appealing than painful self-mutilation (dare I say more appealing? Hmmm could be, I’ll hopefully get to find out) it also gets me both out of the wretched state of Georgia but also out of the south altogether! Amusing coincidence: it would put me less than 30 min from the town I geographically based Salencia’s hometown on, Estes Park; that could be fun!

I’m not yet back into Book 3. I swear, I will be by end of summer if not sooner, but I need a working break from it to get back into the swing of things. I’ll be working on some short stories and some pet projects of uncertain nature, then try to get back into my Now & Forever groove; I have to! Don’t know about anyone else, but I’m curious to see what their wedding turns out like! (I am not calling that a spoiler, I don’t even know which book it happens in and anyone who didn’t see it coming during Love or Lust clearly hasn’t been paying attention)

I’m really sorry to delay things. But I don’t believe in writing just for the sake of word count. I want quality, not quantity. I’d have thrown out so much of what might have git written these past few months and got myself so thoroughly mired in nonsense that it would only have made things worse to force the matter. Please be patient, I promise you’ll appreciate the resultant book a great deal more.

What purpose does it serve you to discriminate against those whom you are sworn to serve? Or to encourage and support those who would do so?

First of all, your oaths of office are to serve your states, counties, countries, cities … not select portions of it, but all of it. Seems to me, you’ve an obligation to all of them, minority or not, rich or poor, LGBTQIA+ or not, it doesn’t matter.

Then there’s the simple fun fact that you’re an elected official. Seems to me that running on a platform of hatred, oppression, discrimination, etc. may help in the short run, if you can stir up enough of one crowd and hope more of them can get to the polls (or somehow discourage the rest from making it to them) than those whom you’ve just campaigned to alienate. Once in office you have to hope your vitriolic efforts don’t push too far and alienate even those who once supported you.

Most importantly, it’s just self destructive. What good is it to legislate or govern a state that is destitute? What worthwhile businesses will a state, city, county, country, or what have you attract if that place is doing all it can to tell people they aren’t welcome here? Worse, what businesses will want to be beholden to the laws of a place that might be so two-faced as to claim to be welcoming but then is exclusionary in practice?

Businesses want the best and brightest. Most have learnt that this means accepting people for who they are so that they aren’t missing out on some brilliant individual who will help them to turn over that almighty profit. They won’t find their best and brightest in a place that drives them off, that discourages them moving there in the first place, and so on.

Georgia, Texas, and others trying to pass “right to discriminate” laws? Oh, you’ll attract some businesses with that, but not the kind you’re liable to be terribly proud of: places that’ll be in constant litigation over wage theft and other labour abuses looking for one less thing they can get sued for.

It doesn’t just have to be sexuality or gender identity. How about women? The poor? True, if no one is treating a demographic well then you’ve nothing to worry about; but that’s not the case. When every Carolinian who can is headed to California, Vermont … or Americans headed for Switzerland, Norway …

Taxes! Your money. Where will it come from? You want people to want to stay, and to want to come. You want people to have jobs that pay them well. Conservative politicians may not have realised it, but the 19th century is over, and with it the viability of a system ruled and owned by a small elite over an enslaved majority. That can work in agrarian societies, feudalism or its analogues, but today that just won’t fly. What makes money isn’t pigs and corn, chickens and beets … it’s money, it’s commerce. Industry, even, in the end is commerce.

Commerce doesn’t work if people haven’t jobs. Jobs are worthless if there’s no money. Do you really think it wise to encourage unemployment by acting rashly?

You want to legislate holy books? How about “judge not”? How about charity? How about hospitality? How about Man was made to be the stewards of this world? All of those come from the Christian Bible that so many who are fond of legislating intolerance seem inclined to cite … funny how the same ones legislate against social aid programs, environmental protections, equality, immigration … then again, those same voices do all they can to defund education; funny, the American South tried banning slaves being literate, even for a time before that tried to not let the slaves be Christian at all in order to keep them knowing about things like the book of Exodus. I suppose shouting the Old Testament to people who can’t make heads nor tails of the New Testamentworks, but to what purpose?

Have you a plan for what to do with these people? Certainly not hire them, even the good straight Christians are now illiterate & useless as employees beyond the most menial tasks. Not have them in your cities; you’ve done all you can to criminalise being broke and/or homeless … even if you regressed things to an Antebellum society, are you ready to live in an age of outhouses, woodstoves, gas lamps, and horsedrawn buggies? Today’s society was built by, for, and with a middle class enjoying freedom and economy for leisure … they sent their children to colleges, bought cars and computer, they watched movies, listened to radios …

No sirs, madams, and others … conservatives who want to maintain a status quo that no longer exists must, therefore, push for regression; and regression is always harmful. History teaches us this; the Dark Ages didn’t get their name from a candles shortage or some solar calamity. They were a regression from a time of high literacy, education that permitted the building and maintaining of such things as flushing toilets, hot & cold running water, widespread international (and intercontinental) trade, effective medicines and surgeries, and more. Put bluntly: for a few centuries, most of Europe had lost the fork.

Conservativism has a place. It’s good for society to have a voice that says “hold on, now, is this change good? Or is it just change for the sake of change?” Fiscal conservativism doubly so, except today’s fiscal conservatives less often ask “General/President/Congressman, just where in Hell do you expect to find the money for this idea?” and, instead, are more inclined to cut specific spending, but hand blank cheques over to other sorts … often much more expensive sorts.

It’s all related. Is it worth spending so much to defend state laws & amendments that should never have been taken seriously enough to have made it to a ballot in the first place? Defending it costs money. It’s bad press: businesses looking askance at your environment & thinking they can attract better talent elsewhere (whoops, there goes various tax & license funds). It’s that much less work for existing business (more marriages means more caterers and florists get work!). It’s that much more spent on welfare to take care of children waiting to be adopted. It’s lost spending by people who leave, never move to, or never want to visit.

It is said that evil carries the seed of its own downfall. What can be more evil than hatred, whether you choose to dress it in fancy clothes and call it discrimination or not, it is what it is. And denial of rights or denial that what is being withheld is a right is intolance, discrimination, in a word: hate. Look at World War II Germany … perhaps, if the Nazis hadn’t been so eager to round up Jews, gays, and others it would have been they who had the first atom bombs; it was more than a few of their scientists who helped the US invent the thing, after all.

Simple point of note: history remembers Lincoln freeing the slaves, and that Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. No one knows the names of those who put the slaves in their chains, and in the Biblical story of Moses the oppressor was a villain and liberator a hero. Who is recalled more kindly? Dr Martin Luther King or Chancellor Adolf Hitler? Ghandi or Genghis Khan?

Your place in history was recorded the day people took to the polls. What role will you play in history’s narrative? Hero or villain? Saint or sinner? Healer or murderer? Bringer of peace or of war?

Maybe it’s time to look around and see that there’s a bigger world, a bigger picture, than your campaign podium and your biggest contributers, because shortsightedness could cost you personally, will almost certainly affect your children, is all but guaranteed to affect their children, and their children have no choice but to face the consequences of our actions today. Remember that Reconstruction, after the American Civil War, was a slew of rash decisions that came to a head almost exactly 100 years later.

I imagine many of my readers are well aware of the critical lack of good sense and logic presented yesterday in the 6th circuit court decision (readers outside the US may be less aware, but you’ll get it soon).

I wanted to quote the meat of what one of the judges said on the matter which showed an acute misunderstanding of the purpose of the courts in this country. It’s covered by the dissenting judge’s statement, but I wanted it for the contrast. I can’t find it now, and while I can find the PDF of the decision, it’s very long and I got a headache trying to find what I wanted.

In any case the bans were upheld because the judge said that it is a matter of social change that the people seeking that change should find through conversation in the political sphere and therefore is none of the court’s business.

Because, of course, it’s none of the court’s business to uphold the constitution and overturn unjust or unconstitutional law!? The main reason I wanted to quote the statement was because it was such complete bullshit that it was staggering. I almost felt that the only way the two judges that upheld the ban could possibly have said anything so inherently stupid was just to force the issue to be handled by the US Supreme Court.

Thursday’s decision by the Sixth Circuit upholding four states’ ban on same-sex marriage humored many of conservatives’ favorite arguments, but the 2-1 decision included a fiery dissent by Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey, a Clinton appointee. While Daughtrey’s opinion challenged many of the majority’s arguments, she made an overall point that encapsulates what’s lacking — and harmful — about the most modern arguments against marriage equality.

“In the main, the majority treats both the issues and the litigants here as mere abstractions,” she wrote. “Instead of recognizing the plaintiffs as persons, suffering actual harm as a result of being denied the right to marry where they reside or the right to have their valid marriages recognized there, my colleagues view the plaintiffs as social activists who have somehow stumbled into federal court, inadvisably, when they should be out campaigning to win ‘the hearts and minds’ of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee voters to their cause.”

That’s the biggest divide between the two sides on same-sex marriage: is it an issue, or is it about people?

She specifically talks in detail about the Michigan plaintiffs, April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, a lesbian couple who have been together for eight years and are raising three children, two of whom are now categorized as having “special needs.” Each of the children is only legally adopted by either DeBoer and Rowse, because Michigan prevents them from co-adopting as a same-sex couple. Daughtrey said she’d have no problem upholding the district court ruling in their favor, noting that “the State of Michigan allows heterosexual couples to marry even if the couple does not wish to have children, even if the couple does not have sufficient resources or education to care for children, even if the parents are pedophiles or child abusers, and even if the parents are drug addicts.”

Are you a vegetarian/vegan?

No. Though I was until I got married to someone who I can’t seem to convince that humans aren’t carnivores – I didn’t grow up not eating meat so it was no hardship to give in to the fact that I was not going to win the argument against cooking steaks, chicken, pork, etc.

So you’re married?

Yes

To a man or woman?

Yes

Tea or Coffee?

Tea by preference, though if I’ve an empty stomach I have to keep it to specific herbals or just go with coffee. Tea on an empty tummy makes me extremely sick for no reason I can understand.

You use a peculiar grammar and spelling, where are you from?

Books. Seriously, I learned most of what I know of English from reading so much; I read a great many English authours and American authours from the days when the written languages between English and American weren’t as different, but I do read some newer American authours which causes some of the peculiarities. Where I was formally educated really is irrelevant since I don’t actually remember a damned thing from my English lessons, and my family speaks with a rather eclectic mix of dialects and accents.

Your books seem a little mixed on the subject of feminism, but you admit that you’re a woman. Are you a feminist or anti-feminist?

Neither. My feelings on the matter of this stuff I think can be best stated by Ms Emma Watson in her amazing speech to the U.N. I believe in equality. A woman who wants to be June Cleaver and a woman who wants to be just this side of Teddy Roosevelt after male-to-female transition are both advancing the cause of feminism since the whole point comes down to having the freedom to choose, and I think that (as Ms Watson said) we too often forget the poor gents in the subject. They have their own degrading stereotypes as well – what business is it of mine if Dennis Rodman wants to wear a dress? I’m not going to tell him he’s any less a man for it.

Your “biography” page says you don’t speak Swahili. Do you speak any other languages besides English? Your books have French and Italian in them …

And I’m quite good at faking those languages with a little help from a dictionary and the Latin I studied in school. I, sadly, no longer have any functional proficiency in Latin even though I adore the language (far too little opportunity to use and expand, the dangers of studying a dead language), but I remember enough of the core of the language to understand how to use what I look up when translating out of English and into the French and Italian used in my stories. English is my only fluent language, though I’m conversant in American so long as the topic doesn’t stray too far.

You mention that your writing only pays your power bill, what do you do for a living?

Telephony switch engineering. I work for an internet/cable/phone company fixing switch issues with customers’ phone features and phone services. Before that, with the same company, I worked various permutations of technical support for either the customers themselves or the in-field technicians. Mostly it’s a very boring job, and I’m not sure with what it pays “a living” is a strictly accurate term, but it pays the rent.

Amiga. Sadly they’re getting more than a little dated, so I use Macs. If I must use a PC I put Debian Linux (Testing) on it … or, by ultimate preference, DOS. I’ve been using computers for a long time. I’ve used a plethora of hardware, OS, software. I’ve things I like and hate about most things, Windows and most Microsoft products are the sole exception: I find nothing positive to say about their products that couldn’t be said about anything else like them and couldn’t have been said about those other things first … but could go on at length about all the things I hate. The single positive thing is that MS Word does make putting different page numbering in one part of a document versus another easier than any other current word processor.

Neither, or iOS. For a tablet I prefer iOS. I have rather mixed feelings about smartphones. Android, by-and-large doesn’t impress me, though I’ve nothing against it in theory, just in specific details of how it’s implemented. Most reasoned arguments against Android generally echo my own feelings about it.

And I think that concludes for now. I’ve run out of ideas, and probably should stop goofing off now anyway.

My initial problem was that the PDF had decided to be 8.5in x 11in. The book is 6in x 9in.

The program I’d made the PDF with was refusing to make a 6×9 PDF. Even though it has done so in the past.

So I use a different program to make the PDF. YAY! Fits … but now Createspace is convinced that something is off the edge of the page … which isn’t … and wouldn’t let me approve the proof.

So I use another another PDF creator … proof is approvable! Yay! Excess blank pages are randomly inserted into the middle of sections of the book, one of them near the beginning so that page … n/m, just awkwardness happens. Oh, and to top it off? Suddenly one of my fleurons is 72dpi, despite the fact that I copy/paste the same image every single time and there are over 100 in there, just the one near the top of page 16. I’d ignore it, but since I need to fix the blank pages, I may as well figure it out too.

Oh, and why must I use a PDF? Because Word refuses to embed all the fonts I used, CreateSpace doesn’t have all the fonts I used, and LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Pages, and KOffice all don’t embed those fonts either.

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I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this. I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place. I am as passionate about this campaign as I ever was about apartheid. For me, it is at the same level.

~~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu

J. R. R. Tolkien in his introduction to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings:
“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”

"Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!"

~~ Gore Vidal

“There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.”

― L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl

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